Stephen’s battle royale
A right royal battle for the top spot in the true blue St. Stephen’s College, Delhi (estb. 1881)  widely acknowledged as India’s most respected liberal arts undergrad college  is in the offing. This latest denouement in St. Stephen’s follows the resignation of Dr. Valson Thampu after just 10 months in office as principal of the college. In June last year following a prolonged ideological struggle and bitter in-fighting within the supreme council of St. Stephen’s, hardliners of the (protestant) Church of North India to which the supreme council reports, managed to oust the college’s long-serving (1991-2007) liberal principal Dr. Anil Wilson from office. Shortly thereafter much to the dismay of the college’s high-profile alumni, the supreme council resolved to reserve 40 percent of its annual intake for ‘dalit Christians’ transforming St. Stephen’s (in Wilson’s words) from a Christian college to a Church institution subordinate to "power structures of the political establishment within the church".
But following the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions expressing doubts about the authenticity of his Ph D in theology, awarded by the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, Thampu put in his papers at St. Stephen’s on March 15, leaving senior faculty member M.S. Frank to manage the college as protem administrator until the appointment of a new principal.
Meanwhile Wilson who had accepted the office of vice chancellor of Himachal University has resigned, giving rise to speculation that he may stage a comeback at St. Stephen’s. Although Wilson has reportedly signed up to head Starex University  a notified private sector varsity in Chattisgarh  the general consensus is that he is open to persuasion to return to St. Stephen’s.
Quite obviously the war between the liberals and hardliners within India’s top liberal arts college is far from over.
Secret conquest of America
Although in contemporary politics it’s now well accepted that one can’t fool all the people all the time, ministers and politicians of all ideological hues and shades of opinion don’t stop trying. For instance in his Budget 2008-09 speech to Parliament on February 29, finance minister P. Chidambaram announced a 20 percent increase in the Central government’s outlay for education which rose from Rs.28,674 crore in 2007-08 to Rs.34,400 crore in the current fiscal year. But he obviously forgot to tell Parliament and the public that most of the incremental outlay emanated from the Parambhik Shiksha Kosh fund aka the 3 percent education cess levied on all direct taxpayers which was budgeted under a separate head last year (Rs.10,393 crore). In the FM’s 2008-09 budget speech there is no mention of the education cess. It has been quietly merged into the overall outlay and hey presto, the allocation for education is up by 20 percent. Less excusable is a blatant statement made in Parliament on March 10 by D. Purandeswari, minister of state in the Union ministry of human resource development, to the effect that 38 percent of medical practitioners in the US, 36 percent of scientists in NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, USA) and 34 percent of Microsoft engineers are of Indian origin. These and other wholly inaccurate statistics were reeled out in Parliament by the Rt. Hon minister to prove that India’s crumbling and rapidly obsolescing higher education system is doing fine, thank you. The question of why so many Indian scientists and engineers are voting with their feet for America apart, there is bewilderment in the media and academia as to why this massive conquest of America by Indian scientists and engineers has been kept a state secret all this while.
P.S. The minister of state for education (aka human resource development) is the daughter of N.T. Rama Rao, the charismatic late chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.
Better read than heard
When celebrated author and Nobel laureate, the London-based Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V.S.) Naipaul somewhat grandiosely appointed author-journalist Patrick French as his ‘official biographer’ granting full access to his private papers, he probably expected the latter to write a sympathetic biography, if not a cringing hagiography. Instead, French has written a warts and all biopic of the great man which shows him up as a mean, racist, unfeeling individual given to making peremptory judgements and solely interested in looking after No.1. Your editor has  or rather had  been acquainted with Vidia, as he prefers to be addressed, stretching back two decades spanning Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore. In the early nineties, I devised a brilliant schema to publish and market a specially printed limited edition of The Collected Works of V.S. Naipaul in several geographically segregated volumes with a special intro for each set penned by the great man himself, for our mutual profit. But after I managed to persuade a typically timorous accidental IT tycoon to risk a shoe-string amount to fund the project, Naipaul did an about-turn and demanded an upfront  rather than the back-ended fortune that the project had budgeted. And that was the end of that potentially grand enterprise.
Yet during the entire period I knew him which involved considerable group wining and dining, never once did I witness Vidia or his wife Nadira  or Lady Naipaul as she prefers to title herself  settle a bill. On the contrary I clearly remember that circa 1998, when I was somewhat financially strained, I paid a Rs.1,200 dinner bill for the three of us at the Ebony rooftop restaurant in Bangalore.
Despite this, I doubt if Naipaul is avaricious. Astonishingly, in 1997 when Newsweek offered him a stupendous sum of $50,000 (Rs.20 lakh) to write a one page column in the Washington-based weekly’s special issue to commemorate 50 years of India’s independence, he spurned the offer. According to him, Newsweek should have let him bill them. "You don’t negotiate with a heart surgeon when you need his services, do you?" was his rationalisation. Unfortunately my cordial relationship with the Naipauls has tapered off following his blossoming friendship with the London-based literary dilettante, Farrukh Dhondy with whom I had a long-standing feud resulting in a lawsuit in London and culminating in a prolonged war of words in the columns of the Asian Age circa 2000.
Yet no regrets. Most writers are better read than heard.